Lourdes Garcia-Navarro

Dario Lopez MillsN/A

Lourdes Garcia-Navarro is an NPR international correspondent covering South America for NPR. She is based in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Previously, she served a NPR's correspondent based in Israel, reporting on stories happening throughout the Middle East. She was one of the first reporters to enter Libya after the 2011 Arab Spring uprising began and spent months painting a deep and vivid portrait of a country at war. Often at great personal risk, Garcia-Navarro captured history in the making with stunning insight, courage and humanity.

For her work covering the Arab Spring, Garcia-Navarro was awarded a 2011 George Foster Peabody Award, a Lowell Thomas Award from the Overseas Press Club, and an Edward R. Murrow Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Alliance for Women and the Media's Gracie Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement.

Before her assignment to Jerusalem began in 2009, Garcia-Navarro served for more than a year as NPR News' Baghdad Bureau Chief and before that three years as NPR's foreign correspondent in Mexico City, reporting from that region as well as on special assignments abroad.

Garcia-Navarro got her start in journalism as a freelancer with the BBC World Service and Voice of America, reporting from Cuba, Syria, Panama and Europe. She later became a producer for Associated Press Television News before transitioning to AP Radio. While there, Garcia-Navarro covered post-Sept. 11 events in Afghanistan and developments in Jerusalem. In 2002, she began a two-year reporting stint based in Iraq.

In addition to the Murrow award, Garcia-Navarro was honored with the 2006 Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize for a two-part series "Migrants' Job Search Empties Mexican Community." She contributed to NPR News reporting on Iraq, which was recognized with a 2005 Peabody Award and a 2007 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton.

Garcia-Navarro holds a Bachelor of Science degree in International Relations from Georgetown University and an Master of Arts degree in journalism from City University in London.

This Thursday, the eyes of the world will be on Brazil during the World Cup's opening ceremony. And there'll be a remarkable moment during that event. From São Paulo, NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro reports.

The stadium where the opening game of the World Cup will be played is a gleaming monument to the world's favorite sport, soccer. The Corinthians Arena — named after one of Brazil's most famous teams, which will take it over — has been built from scratch and boasts a massive LCD screen and state-of-the-art facilities.

Last weekend, it was full of fans watching the last test match before the World Cup begins. It was supposed to be a sort of final run-through to make sure everything is ready and working.

And I'm Audie Cornish. Just nine days to go before the World Cup soccer tournament begins in Brazil. And a poll released today by the Pew Research Center shows that the mood among Brazilians is grim. NPR's Lordes Garcia-Navarro reports a country that seemed to be taking off just a few years ago feels like it's crashing, instead.

In Sao Paulo's poor north zone, in the neighborhood of Tucuruvi, teams of city workers knock on doors, warning people to take pets and small children out of the area.

Quickly after, men in hazmat suits with metal cylinders strapped to their backs start spraying the street, and some of the interiors of the homes, with powerful pesticides. This is the front line of the war on dengue fever in Brazil's largest city.

Parallels

3:16 pm

Mon May 19, 2014

Brazilian kids play soccer in a favela, or shantytown, in Rio de Janeiro on Sunday. Brazil is hosting the World Cup next month and its team is considered the favorite. Many of the country's top players learned the game playing in the street or on dirt fields.

The road to World Cup glory in Brazil doesn't start in fancy soccer clubs or private schoolyards. It often begins in places like this poor neighborhood called Rio Pequeno in Sao Paulo and on a dirt lot, where a group of children are playing soccer.

Brazil is hosting the World Cup, which starts in less than a month, and the country is also favored to win. Brazil is already a five-time champion and it has played in every World Cup since the tournament's inception.

Parallels

4:09 am

Sun March 30, 2014

Demonstrators rally to protest sexism in Brasilia, Brazil, last June. A new protest erupted last week after a study released by Brazil's Institute for Applied Economic Research reported 65 percent of Brazilians believe women who dress provocatively deserve to be attacked.

Editor's Note: NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, who has worked extensively in the Latin America and the Middle East, recently compared the sexism she found in both places. You can read her original essay here. It sparked a strong response from readers, and we asked her to address a number of those issues.

A man throws acid on a woman's face. A mother is killed because her partner believes she slept with another man.

Parallels

4:07 pm

Mon March 24, 2014

Venezuelans line up to buy goods at a store in Caracas on March 10. Protesters have been taking to the streets for weeks over the country's troubled economy and other issues. The government introduced a new foreign currency exchange system on Monday, seeking to stabilize the bolivar, which has lost much of its value against the U.S. dollar.

The Venezuelan capital, Caracas, can be one of the most expensive cities in the world — or one of the cheapest. It all depends on how you exchange your dollars.

At a fast food restaurant in the city recently, a pretty tasty plate of chicken and rice cost me 160 bolivars. At the official exchange rate set by the government, that works out to a little more than $25; at the black market rate, it's just $2.

Needless to say, most anyone who can change money on the black market in Venezuela does so.

A semi-naked woman in a sequined Carnival costume. A veiled woman with only her eyes showing in a niqab. Two stereotypes of two vastly different regions — Latin America and the Middle East.

On the surface, these two images couldn't be more diametrically opposed. What could the two have in common, right? What a woman wears — or what she doesn't wear, in Brazil's case — is often interpreted as a sign of her emancipation. The veil, for many, is a symbol of female oppression; the right to wear a bikini, one of liberation.